Current Practice in Climate Service Visualization: Taking the Pulse of the Providers’ Community

Towards more effective visualisations in climate services: good practices and recommendations

“…Recent developments in climate science are moving beyond the simple presentation of data and provide interactive visual tools for data exploration and analysis (Nocke 2014;Giuliani et al 2017). This trend was also identified by climate service providers during the visualisation workshop (Terrado et al 2022) and goes in line with the assumption that understanding of information can be improved through greater interaction (Yi et al 2007). From the perspective of data visualisation, interaction design includes options related to the selection (i.e.…”

“…Due to the diversity of content and stakeholders, determining a one-size-fits-all visualisation practice for climate services would be a daunting task, if not impossible. However, a number of highlights, including both common practices and challenges for the development of visualisations in climate services, were identified in a workshop involving climate service providers (Terrado et al 2022) and constitute the basis of the present review (see Section 2.1). The overarching take home message from the workshop was that climate service visualisations need to be developed by transdisciplinary teams with clear collaboration frameworks among academia and other stakeholders, recognising the essential role of social sciences, humanities, visualisation, behavioural sciences and other complementary research fields.…”

“…This study takes as departing point the challenges identified in an interactive visualisation workshop organised in the framework of a Coordination and Support Action on climate services (Terrado et al 2022). The aim of the workshop was to monitor current practices applied by climate services providers when developing visualisations and identify issues that need to be tackled for moving towards the development of more effective visualisations.…”

“…Learning about user needs is key to ensure that climate service visualisations include the information required by users and that it is provided in a format that is simple and digestible. Looking at current practices in the climate services field, stakeholders are rarely involved in the initial stages of the visualisation development (Terrado et al 2022). Rather, they are often reached at a later stage for the testing of the final visualisation.…”

“…1e, where the left bar contains a help section with access to a guided tour of the tool and to advanced information. Special attention to these elements has been increasingly paid by climate services providers looking for bridging the terminology gap with stakeholders (Terrado et al 2022).…”